Episode 2: The “Ease Edit” for Your Next Membership Launch

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EPISODE DESCRIPTION & LINKS:

In this episode of "Membership-Driven Business," host Natalie Taylor explores how to achieve a smoother, more enjoyable experience for your next membership launch.

By focusing on experience over ease, Natalie offers practical advice on how to improve your launch process for yourself, your team, and your audience.

What You'll Learn:

The difference between ease and experience in the context of launching a membership.
How to conduct an ease audit before your next launch.
Strategies for enhancing the launch experience for your audience and team.
The importance of clarity and respecting your audience's time during a launch.

Episode Highlights:

The Ease Audit: Natalie discusses the common desire for ease in launching and why focusing on experience can lead to better outcomes.
Time and Clarity: Learn how to respect your audience’s time and improve clarity in your launch process.
The Importance of Experience: Understand how the overall experience of a launch affects you, your team, and your potential customers.
Reflection and Improvement: Questions to ask yourself to refine and improve your launch strategy.

Links and Resources:

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PREFER TO READ? HERE’S THE TRANSCRIPT:

Whenever I start a new project with a client, I ask them this question: “What are three words that you want to represent your next promotion for your membership?”

Some tell me they want more freshness or more fun. Some say joy, some say beauty, but at least 50 percent of the time, people tell me that what they really want is more ease.

"I want more ease in my next launch."

I'm always so fascinated by this answer, and of course, I totally get it because executing a big launch with all the bells and whistles can be utterly exhausting.

So, I'm all for more ease. I'm totally on board with eliminating what feels bad, was needlessly complex, or just wasn't worth the time you spent on it.

But I also think there's a better question to ask here.

And that's because "How can this be easy?" is a question that's often based on a false premise or the assumption that if you can just do all the right things in just the right way, then launching or growing your membership will be easy…

And I disagree.

So in this episode, I want to give you a new frame as you think about your next promotion, and three ways you can do an ease audit before your next launch.

The new frame I want you to try on is to swap the idea of ease for experience. And before we talk about experience, I want to look at the meaning of ease and how by its very definition, chasing ease can often set us up for failure.

Ease is elusive, but experience is everything

Ease is defined as the state of being comfortable and free from various forms of discomfort or difficulty.

Now, I don't know about you, but I think hard work and some amount of stress is inherent to being in business and frankly, to being a human being. But there's so much language in the business and self-help world about letting things be easy—launch with ease, sell with ease, scale with ease.

And so we end up in unwinnable positions when we go into a launch expecting it to be easy and decide that we're doing something wrong or something is wrong with us if it feels hard.

So, can we all agree that sometimes it's just really hard?

If we can accept that, then we have an opportunity to improve, to lighten the load, to optimize, and find what feels better.

But if our baseline for success is easy and nothing else is good enough, then we're playing a losing game right from the start.

So when I go into a launch with a client, I like to think about experience instead and to pull out my dictionary again, experience is an event or an occurrence which leaves an impression on someone.

When we optimize for experience, everybody wins

Your launch is an experience. It's an experience for you, your team, and your audience, and prospective customers too.

And when we think about a launch in this way, it allows us to think more holistically about the impact of our launch, our promotions, and how it feels for everyone who interacts with them.

How you feel about your launch, how it impacts your team, what it's like for your customers, your potential customers—it's all in sync.

If it feels bad for you, it probably feels bad for your team.

If it's unclear for your customers, it's probably because it's not clear for you either.

And if you feel bored, then this is often reflected right back to you in a lack of engagement from your team and your audience too. It's all connected.

And I often find that if we work to improve the experience of launching for everyone involved, then more ease is often a by-product of that process.

But what also happens is that we start asking better questions and bigger questions — about how to deliver something incredible to customers, how to streamline things for our team, and how to make launching and selling our memberships not necessarily easy and free of effort, but something that feels aligned and rewarding and absolutely worth it.

Nobody knows your launches better than you, but here are some ideas…

Now, there are countless ways that you can create a better launch experience.

So much of it will be based on your own data and your own track record with launching. And as you're listening to this episode right now, I know you have already got a ton of feedback in your head around what didn't feel good in your last launch, what didn't work, and maybe a hunch about what might be worth leaning into next time.

Improving from launch to launch is a really personal thing.

You might be able to get started with a template or someone else's system, but eventually, you have to run your own race and start looking at what's in front of you in your business and start to look at your own experience and iterate from there.

So with that said, I do have a couple of places where you might find some opportunities based on my experience of doing this work with clients.

And at the end of this episode, I'll share some questions you can ask yourself to do your own “ease audit” before your next promotion or launch.

Time is currency. Are you respecting theirs (and yours)?

A great place to get started is by asking and thinking about time.

How much time do you have to execute your launch ideas, and how much time does your audience have to consume what you are planning on creating? A lot of launches don't respect people's time, and it is usually not on purpose, but our time is fractured. Our attention is scattered, and people want more flexible ways to learn from us.

So one change you can make right now is to think about how you deliver your launch content, especially if you're running a promotional challenge or a video series leading up to your launch. Anything that runs over multiple days with content that you want people to consume in a certain order. If you're doing this, then make it easy for them to consume.

Put it in one simple place. And often, we have found that one simple page is better than having people click through to pages within pages and links that update. Also, resist the urge to remove the launch content before your cart closes.

So often, what happens when we're launching is that we have this sort of pre-launch phase where we're delivering all these videos or all this content and then cart opens, and we're in selling mode.

And I recently was on the buying end of a program where I knew that enrollment was coming up because I was on the wait list. I was interested. But I was busy living my life. So I only noticed that the cart was open on the very last day. And this is so common.

We pay close attention to our launches, but most people are just driving by, even if they're serious potential buyers.

Respecting people’s time means giving them choice

So how can we improve the experience for them? In this launch example, the business owner was running a three-part video series with auto-updating pages and lots of redirects and a bunch of live-only Q&A style sessions without replays.

And because I came into the launch when they had already shifted from their pre-launch, "here's all of our content" window into "buy now."

Everything that I wanted to consume was being redirected away from me, and it actually became really hard for me to make the buying decision when I couldn't access any of their content to understand how they think, how they approach the problem that I wanted help with, and how they might go about solving it with me inside their program.

So for me, as the kind of buyer who needs to have information in order to buy—which is a very common type of buyer, but not the only type—it was really hard for me to make the decision to buy.

We can get so caught up in all the cool tech available that we lose what is important, which is that doing something simply, doing it well, and with clarity is sometimes the best approach.

Now, you might not have a really cool tech stack for your launch. You might not be doing all these fancy redirects, but no matter what you're doing, it's really worthwhile to ask the question of whether this feels easy and whether it's a good experience for someone else to consume.

Are your launches flexible enough?

In my case, because I didn't fit the exact mold of how the business owner wanted me to consume their content at a certain time and only live, I missed out entirely. So ask yourself:

Does my buying experience actually feel good for people to go through?

Can they go through it on their own terms?

Do they need to come to everything live?

Is that really essential, or is there just one thing that I really, really want them to attend live and the rest they can consume on their own time?

And am I clear in my communication about how to put this time aside, the reason why they should come live, and which parts they can watch on their own?

Setting those expectations is so important.

Alternatively, you might be looking back and realizing that there's just more complexity here than feels good for you, right? That's impacting your experience. It feels more complex than it needs to for you, for you as the business owner, even for the team to roll out and maintain, and then update.

So if that's the case, and you feel like, "Oh gosh, the stuff I did in my most recent launch probably was a bit too complex for me," then that's totally normal. I think that this is the nature of experimentation, which I will always encourage. So there's always an ebb and flow.

Often you have to try something before you'll know how well it works and how it feels before you can decide if it's a fit for you.

So just staying reflective is a good practice, and perfection is not required. I think it's totally normal to swing too far in one direction, to try out a new strategy, a new tool, a new platform, and then course correct in the next launch.

And what's important is remembering that you always have a choice.

I do not agree that more complex is necessarily better. In fact, I like to start from a simple place, and then as time goes by and layer on more, often what happens is we will peel those things back off anyway. And that's just how the fine-tuning works.

But if you can start by asking how would this launch actually feel for someone to experience and interact with, and for us to deliver, then you'll never be too far off base.

And you might just find some more ease in the process as well.

Clarity = showing people where & how you fit into their life

So, looking at time is one way that you can improve the launch experience for you, your team, your potential customers. Clarity is another. And to illustrate my point, I'm going to come right back to that example I was sharing of the launch with the never-ending redirects.

So when I found it difficult to consume their sales content and their sales videos, I, of course, went to their sales page in order to help me make my decision. Unfortunately, I still couldn't get a clear sense of what the learning experience would be like, even though they did have a breakdown of their modules and their programs inside the learning area.

And this is so important when you have a membership—this is where it gets different, say, than a course because in a course, you have a sequence people go through, in a membership, you're really integrating your offer into the fabric of people's lives.

People need to understand where do you fit in my day, in my week, in my month.

And so looking at this page, I didn't really have clarity over what I'd be doing first, second, or third. And even though I understood what was in the program, I didn't really get how I'd be moving through it.

People need to see where your membership fits into their routine

And again, not everyone needs this information or all of the information. But you will never regret sharing all of it because the people that do need it are going to be supported in their decision to buy. If you provide it to them, and everybody needs to understand how your membership will fit into the structure of their life, what will they do and when, and not just what they will get.

And what was really funny to me about this offer is that, in their marketing copy, they were so adamant about how clear their process was, how there was an exact system to what they were teaching. And yet I, on the outside, was really confused as a I couldn't see how all the puzzle pieces came together.

And this is often the case with a membership because, hey, you add to it over time, and eventually it gets to the point where there's just so much in there that you end up telling people everything they get because it's all good, right?

You wouldn't put it in there if it wasn't good.

But what happens for a reader is that it feels like there's everything in there but the kitchen sink — and so it's difficult for them to see a path forward.

And this can happen even to mature memberships.

I'd say that it is a big risk for mature memberships because they're the ones with the most mature and robust collection of content. So you'll often find yourself in a position where you need to start whittling down what you start talking about in your launchers and on your sales page copy so that your potential customers can see the best and most important parts of the membership and not everything that's included, which can sometimes feel overwhelming.

And that's certainly how I felt experiencing this launch. I was overwhelmed, but I was also kind of annoyed, even though I know it wasn't their intention at all. And hey, look, we're all just doing our best out here. So no judgment from me, but I was trying so hard to engage, and yet hitting a brick wall.

You don’t have to market everything inside your membership (and you shouldn’t)

So ask yourself the question:

Could a potential buyer look at my sales copy and understand what are the three things I'm going to do with you? And in what order in the first 30 days of joining, where will I be 30 days from now?

This is critical because many memberships renew on a 30-day basis. And so the buying decision isn't just made once; it's made every single renewal period.

So being able to articulate where someone will be between now and their next buying decision is really powerful.

That's going to be important for you to not just secure a sale but to secure a recurring sale, which is really the lifeblood of a membership.

So, do members, do prospective members understand what an average week or month as a member will look like once they buy? And if not, you might need to do some work on clarifying people's ongoing experience of learning from you so that they can make a competent decision to jump in and join.

You might also find with a membership that you've been running for a couple of years now that what you want their learning experience to look like has evolved and changed.

I do often find that memberships can have an identity crisis that happens every couple of years, every 18 months to two years, where the direction of the membership, the content, and even the overall vision for the business is evolving. And so the customer experience is evolving too.

And sometimes that hasn't caught up in the copy and the marketing and the launches for your membership.

It’s not just what your customers will learn — it’s how they’ll practice it, too

So this is really an ongoing activity that we're always working to identify and clarify people's experience and journey. And making that clear in your launches and then in your onboarding and retention activities as well.

I've danced around this point a little bit already, but clarity is something that will drive not just more sales but better retention for your membership.

So, are you confident that people know how to spend their time inside the membership with you now that they are customers?

How often do you communicate this to them? And usually, you have to do it way more often than you think.

Do your members know how much time, or when, or what they should be focusing on and in what order so they can improve?

Some customers are very happy to run their own race, but you might be surprised by how many people are supported by a recommended learning plan or a sample schedule with specifics on what to do and when.

This makes your library of content way less overwhelming for them to navigate but also to work through, which is critical.

You want people to actually use and benefit from this content and training that you're working so hard to develop.

Another way to improve clarity in your launch experience is to look at the questions that come in during the first 30 days of someone becoming a member.

What are people still unclear on?

What do you really wish they were already aware of?

Where do you see people struggling?

In what ways are people using your content, and is it in the way you want them to be using it?

Or do they need more direction about how to engage?

This is a process that begins before somebody clicks "buy," and it continues after they become a member.

It's two sides of the same coin. You absolutely can present and deliver your launch in a way that sets someone up to not just become a member but to become a confident, resourceful member who is getting results and is delighted with their purchase.

So there might be an opportunity here for clarity that you can work on before your next launch.

Respecting time + prioritizing clarity = a better launch experience

Okay. So clarity and time are two places that you can start looking at enhancing your launch experience. If you can ask those questions: where are things not clear for me, not clear for my audience, not clear for my team. And also where could we better respect our audience's time, the team's time, and my time, you might unearth some interesting answers.

And I really do believe that ease is waiting for you on the other side of them too. So to wrap this episode up, I want to leave you with a few questions so that you can do your own ease audit.

You can ask yourself these questions when you finish a launch and you're debriefing, but you can also do it when you're starting to plan a new launch and need to make some decisions about the direction you'll be going in.

Like I mentioned earlier, I think ease is something that comes from looking more closely at experience, and no one has experience with what it's like to run your launches than you do.

That means that all the answers you're looking for aren't in some ultimate super awesome launch system that someone else has perfected, but rather it's about being curious and willing to reflect on what feels good for you, what matters to you and what you want from the business going forward.

This is great news because often with some modifications, the way we sell and promote our memberships can feel really good, not perfect, not stress-free, but good.

The “Ease Audit”: 3 questions to ask before your next membership launch

So here are the three questions I ask my clients when we're planning a launch or debriefing on one we've just done together.

The first is: What did you enjoy, and what didn't you enjoy?

The second question is: What was a source of stress or unnecessary complexity? Ask your team this question as well. Now, these are separate questions because while there might be something that you really enjoyed and feel is worth keeping, we might need to modify it in order to make it more sustainable next time around.

On the flip side, there might've been a part of your launch that was pretty straightforward to execute, but you just didn't love it. And you don't want to put your energy behind it next time. Maybe you even want to work on elevating it. You know you could do it better the next time around. So it's important to ask the question from both sides.

What was my enjoyment factor for each of the moving parts of my launch? And then what was it like to execute, both for me and my team?

The last question we look at—and this one is my favorite—is: What would you love to have more of in your next launch? This might be doing more of what worked, or even adding in a little something that feels like it was missing.

If something feels like it's been missing from your launches, like there was a certain value that you didn't quite get to model or a certain feeling that you didn't really get enough of.

If something feels like it's just a little bit off, then that's good because we'll continue this conversation in the next episode, which is all about how to create more alignment in your launch experience, and specifically how you can bring more of you, more of your values, and more of how you want to show up in the world into your launches and promotions for your membership.

And this is where it gets really fun.

As I was working through my notes for this episode, I realized that there really needed to be a part two to this conversation. So I hope that you'll join me for that next episode. And in the meantime, if you want to get in touch or see how I can help you grow and refine your membership-driven business, just go to membershipdrivenbusiness.com for more info and to get in touch.

Here's to a better launch experience. Let me know how you go with exploring these questions.

I would love to hear from you. Thank you for joining me, and I'll see you next time.